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‘I LOVE
characters who are essentially flawed. And when you meet
Cecilia...she knows she’s being horrible, but she just
can’t stop herself,” said Keira Knightley of her role as
upper-middle-class English beauty Cecilia Tallis in
Oscar hopeful Atonement.
Knightley’s Cecilia—whose sexual liaison with the
housekeeper’s son Robbie (James McAvoy) precipitates a
catastrophic chain of events—echoes the cut-glass accent
and acting of Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter,
an emotionally restrained style of performance that
serves only to heighten the melodrama.
“You’re
looking at the 1930s, 1940s, the peak of that British
stiff upper lip, don’t talk about anything,” Knightley
said. “So you’ve got this brittle being who’s on edge, a
woman who’s a bit like a pressure cooker about to
explode. The fact she’s redeemed by love, by the
sacrifice she’s made, was a really interesting arc to
the character.”
Although
he directed Knightley to a Best Actress Oscar nomination
for Pride & Prejudice, director Joe Wright
originally had in mind another role for her in
Atonement—that of Cecilia’s younger sister Briony,
age 18, who would eventually be played by Romola Garai.
“After making Pride,” Wright said in a telephone
interview, “I thought of her as this 18-, 19-year-old
girl.” When Wright saw the actress at the Pride &
Prejudice premiere in Toronto, he realized his
error. “Keira turned up wearing this Roland Mouret
dress, and she’d changed into a proper woman. I realized
she was right for Cecilia.”
“It’s
amazing how somebody can go, ‘Ah tight dress, she must
be a woman,’” Knightley said, laughing.
“I’d
been playing teenagers, that girl on the cusp of, but
not quite there,” Knightley continued. “I never liked
being a teenager, I always wanted to be grown-up; that’s
why even the roles I’ve played that are teenagers have
always been slightly uncomfortable in who they are. I
suppose I got very frightened I’d be stuck, at 30, still
playing teenagers.”
Given
the early response to her work in Atonement,
Knightley needn’t be concerned about future access to
meaty roles. To get to the core of Cecilia, Knightley
dived back into the rich source material, Ian McEwan’s
novel, finding a psychological and physical underpinning
for her character’s initially hostile behavior toward
McAvoy’s Robbie.
“The
beginning of the book, where it describes Cecilia, it’s
all about how much she needs a cigarette,” Knightley
said. “The whole vibe was a nicotine addict needing a
cigarette and not being able to find one.
“The
most helpful part was the description of her bedroom,”
she adds. “Books that she had half-read, ashtrays
overspilling that she never empties, the cup of cold tea
with the lipstick stains on it. With me it’s always
about finding the images that make the behavior make
sense.” |
